2018 Retrospective

The year has changed and it's time for traditional retrospective of post done in 2018. By numbers 2018 was total of 23 articles which 11 articles were Monthly notes. I visited couple of conferences and some meetups, did software development and tested technology stuff. Business as usual and I presume that it’s going to continue this way also this year.

Monthly notes

It has been proved to be a good way to ensure that I keep reading what happens in software development and also think about it when I collect interesting articles to my Monthly notes series. The series continued with 11 posts.

Meetups

During the year I attended couple of meetups and if you follow me on Twitter you might have noticed that I went to more meetups than I wrote about. There are several interesting events in Helsinki you can attend almost monthly but you've to be quick to participate because usually events fill up quickly. But although the event seems to be full, there's often spots left as some people don't cancel if they can't make it.

OWASP Helsinki chapter meeting 34: Secure API told about "Perfectly secure API" and "Best friends: API security & API management". The event gave good overview to the topics covered and was quite packed with people. Eficode’s premises were modern and there was snacks and beverages. And also a sauna.

Have you ever wondered how to become a bug bounty hunter or wanted to organize a bug bounty program? OWASP Helsinki chapter meeting 35: Bug Bounty programs told all about bug bounty programs from hacker and organizer point of views with topics of "Hunting for bounties in a web browser", "How to become a bug bounty hunter" and "Running a successful bug bounty program".

In August I attended React Helsinki August 2018 meetup at Smartly.io. Topics covered "Splitting React codebases for increased development speed", "Making your own Ignite generator – for React Native" and "Use GraphQL!". There are links to recordings of the presentations.

Meetups and conferences are also nice way to both freshen your thinking, hear how other’s do things, get new ideas and meet people working in the same field.

Conferences

Last year there was lots of interesting conferences in Helsinki. In the Spring there was React Finland 2018 conference which told what’s hot in the React world. The two day conference covered topics of React on day one and day two was React and React Native. The two conference days were packed with great talks and new information.

Where the React Finland was a conference from developers to developers, the opposite was Red Hat Forum Finland 2018 which was held at Finlandia-talo. The mainline was “Ideas worth exploring. Come with questions. Leave with ideas.” The event was divided to keynote and to four breakout sessions. I chose to get hands-on with OpenShift.

The developer conference theme continued in Autumn with GraphQL Finland 2018. The first of its kind event in Finland brought a day of workshops and a day of talks around GraphQL. The event was organized by the same people as React Finland and it showed, in good ways. The talks were interesting, atmosphere was cosy and after party was bookie. All of the talks were live streamed and they’re available on Youtube.

Software development as usual

I managed to write couple of articles regarding software development and topics surrounding it.

Writing documentation is always a task which isn’t much liked and especially with diagrams and flowcharts there’s the problem of which tools to use. I wrote about generating documentation as code with mermaid and PlantUML as an alternative to crafty Draw.io. Using mermaid or PlantUML has the advantage that you can see the changes clearly in human readable text format and maintain source-controlled diagram.

A more practical approach to visualize things was when I did a build monitor with Raspberry Pi and touch screen. Information is a great tool in software development and it’s useful to have easy access to it. Using build monitor to show continuous integration status and metrics from running services helps you notice problems and get them solved quicker.

And as we know learning and staying current in software development is important and expanding your horizons can be achieved with different ways. One good way I have used is following different news sources, newsletters, listening podcasts and attending meetups.

Awesome times ahead

Years change but the blog stays pretty much the same. Also this year plans are to continue as before, write about technology, collect interesting articles, learn new things about software development and of course ride mountain bike.